Saskatchewan

TAKE ONE, June-Sept, 2003 by Tom McSorley

2002 5m40s prod One Ton Ant Moving Images, p/disc/ph/ed Brian Stockton, mus The Supers.

Once and awhile, Canadians everywhere should quietly and firmly thank the political heavens that Saskatchewan is part of Canada. After all, this modest and relatively small province (at least in terms of population) has delivered to Canada such diversified, bedrock, even monumental people and ideas as Tommy Douglas, Gordie Howe, Joni Mitchell and medicare, to name but a few. Veteran independent filmmaker Brian Stockton, who began his work with the SaskPool Film Co--op back in the mid--1980s, has now given us another reason to be grateful for the land of the big sky and open prairie. His concise and engaging film, Saskatchewan, is an unusual sliver of regional autobiography, a beguiling and richly rendered response to a question common to large countries like Canada with geographical distances and mobile populations: where are you from? Using abstract imagery of the prairie landscape as well as more personalized images, layered with a minimalist finsson of spoken memories and musings about where he grew up, St ockton's film becomes surprisingly expansive within its five--and--a--half minute duration. Not only is it a film about the power of origins, it also suggests the complexity and subtlety of how places form us in ways that are at once clear and obscure. A metaphysical postcard from Canada's breadbasket, Saskatchewan offers the mental traveller plenty of nourishment.